Breathless, she steadies herself against the front door, turns to survey all she’s done. A clear path shoveled through the snow. She realizes she’s smiling, unforced.

Her son hoists the head onto a snowman, the ground around him rubbed with snow angels. “Good job, Mom!” he calls. She does a little bow.

There’s nothing of the past in this moment. No fearful future. Just the truth of clean, right-angles of concrete; the V of winter geese barking overhead; sky, cloudless and shockingly blue; melting snow dripping off the roofline. Her heart, bucking hard inside her chest, reminding her she’s alive.

JSP Jacobs is a graduate of the Boise State University Creative Writing Program, Tin House Workshop, and former host of The Writers’ Block on Radio Boise. Her fiction, flash fiction, poetry, and narrative non-fiction have appeared in numerous publications including Nano Fiction, Hawaii Pacific Review, Parent Map, and SmokeLong Quarterly, where she was a 2017 Kathy Fish Fellowship finalist. She lives and writes between Huntington Beach, California, and Boise, Idaho, with her artist husband, six kids, co-dependent dog, and probably way too many pairs of leather pants.